It started with the baby pigeon in her driveway, the one nobody seemed interested in saving. Now, Project Wildlife volunteer Anysia Dickson has bird incubators in her house, a box of baby bunnies in her car and a calling louder than the blaring caw of a hungry crow.

“This is my life,” said Dickson, 43, as she carefully put a rescued baby kestrel falcon back in its crate. “The public has such a big heart when it comes to animals, and that’s why we do what we do. This is a place that gives animals a second chance.”

Squirrels running afoul of dogs. Ducks flying into windows. Opossums getting hit by cars. Baby crows getting blown out of their nests. When people find small wild animals that are injured, sick or abandoned, they take them to Project Wildlife, a local nonprofit that has been rehabilitating and releasing animals back into the wild since 1972.

Dickson grew up in San Diego in a household where stray dogs and various other critters were always welcome. She didn’t know about Project Wildlife until she found a wild animal that needed help. And after the organization took in her baby pigeon, Dickson decided to take on the organization.

“Everyone who told me they would take the pigeon said they would euthanize it, and that’s not what I was looking for,” said Dickson, a Hoover High and Humboldt State graduate who now lives in Temecula. “But after hours of calling around, I found this place. And after my husband drove the pigeon down here, we both said, ‘They helped us. There needs to be people to help them.’”

Last week, Dickson pulled up to the double-wide Linda Vista trailer that functions as the group’s Central San Diego triage center and unloaded the furred and feather cargo she had picked up along the way. There were two boxes of orphaned/abandoned baby bunnies, an injured crow, two injured opossums and the baby kestrel, which had fallen out of its nest.

Like most of the Project Wildlife population, the kestrel was rescued by a good Samaritan. He took the bird to a domestic-animal shelter, the shelter called Project Wildlife, and Project Wildlife called Dickson.

After four years of volunteering and training, Dickson — a longtime waitress at the Marie Callender’s in Escondido — became the group’s songbird team leader in 2011. Given that about 70 percent of the organization’s clientele is a member of the bird family, this means Dickson spends a lot of time with a dropper in her hand and feathers everywhere.

Her house is an approved satellite rehab facility, so Dickson — along with her husband, daughter and mother — also spends a good chunk of her life monitoring incubators, negotiating complicated feeding schedules and doing a lot of poopy laundry. She spends not one single minute minding it.

“They are just so sweet and so dynamic,” Dickson says of the mockingbirds, finches and cedar waxwings in her life. “Every songbird has a personality, and they are all so different. They start off so ugly, and then they grow into such beautiful things. You watch over them and you feed them until the day they don’t need you anymore, and then you send them off knowing you played a little part in their lives before you set them free.”